Despite that nifty little pep talk I wrote myself a week ago, I never made it to Austin. Six hours of windshield time getting there from where I am, combined with however long the event itself would’ve taken, just seemed to gobble a lot of what little home time I have lately. Conscious home time, anyway…

Still, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to read, either. Not after hearing from so many of you who said you wished you could’ve made it. Had you spotted me at about dark-thirty last night, I’d have been huddled up here in my hole, suffering through my own words. . .

Out loud. In their entirety. With as much flair as I could muster, that time of day. And because there are no time constraints here, I wasn’t limited to just an excerpt. I read the whole story (which for those of you who have told me that you just don’t have time for all those damn whatchacallems–oh yeah, words–that excuse doesn’t work this time).

I did all the heavy lifting on this one.

Check it out at your leisure because for the second time since this site launched in January 2018, I posted the audible version of my story. “Forget the Alamo” published in The Ocotillo Review, the Winter 2019 Edition, v3.1, which came out earlier this month from the Austin-based literary nonprofit Kallisto Gaia Press.

Of couse, “literary” takes on some fairly loose interpretations when it comes to most of what I write.

The previous audiofile story was “Mr. Man Candy,” which was first publised in May 2018 Bluestem Magazine, put out by English faculty at Eastern Illinois University. An Excerpt from “Mr. Man Candy” will also appear in the forthcoming Down in  the Dirt Magazine (May/June 2019 Edition, Vol. 164) A Scars Publication, edited by Founder Janet Kuypers, a Chicago-based author and poet.

And with no more ado: